Täby racecourse near Stockholm, the most important racecourse in Sweden and one of only two courses in the country that puts on steeplechasing, held its final meeting last weekend. A new course, Bro Park, is due to open in 2016. The Swedish Horseracing Board proposed that there should be only a flat racecourse at Bro Park. The plan was to hold some races over hurdles that would be set up on the flat race track, and that there should be no more steeplechasing.

However, the Board of the Racing Society that runs Strömsholm racecourse, about 150 km from Stockholm, mounted a challenge to this decision. Strömsholm, the only other steeplechase course in Sweden holds a meeting each year in June, at which the famous Swedish Grand National is the feature event. When she was asked for permission to use the name Grand National for this event, which was first run in 1971, the owner of Aintree racecourse, Mirabel Topham, not only agreed but also sent a trophy, which is still competed for each year.

It was clear that the Swedish Grand National could not survive for long if the races held at Täby racecourse were to disappear. Representatives and friends of Strömsholm racecourse, headed by Ulf Sjöberg, chairman of the board of the Strömsholm horseracing association, were able to force a vote on the plans for Bro Park. The vote was held on October 17^th, and the delegates voted overwhelmingly in favour of building a steeplechase course at the new racecourse.

Support for the survival of steeplechasing in Sweden was expressed, before and after the vote, in Germany, in the Racing Post in the UK, and also here on the Dostihový svět web pages.

Ulf Sjöberg told the Racing Post that he hopes the steeplechase course to be built at Bro Park will be a training ground for young Swedish-trained steeplechasers that will be good enough to stop German-trained horses winning the race every year.

 In June 2015, Czech trainer Stanislav Popelka and Czech jockey Marek Stromský made an expedition to Strömsholm and took second place in the Swedish Grand National, with Hawa Bali.Stanislav Popelka and Marek Stromský are the trainer and the jockey of Nikas, which recently won this year’s Velka Pardubicka,

This coming Sunday, Moss Cloud, trained in Sweden by Dennis Persson, will be ridden by leading Swedish jockey Henrik Engblom in the first running of the Agrofert Velká národní Steeplechase at Prague Velká Chuchle.